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sábado, 5 de dezembro de 2015

Are you doing your work for an ordered
market? A region where there is stability and rules and predictable
outcomes? Some examples: selling to people who have purchased before, entering
a market with established competitors, contributing to a media ecosystem that
works in mostly predictable ways...

The alternative are blue sky arenas where unpredictability
is the rule, not the exception.

Most of us don't live and work on the
frontier, and we plan our lives accordingly.

Life on the frontier brings its own
rewards (and risks) but there's never an advantage in imagining that it's
stable. It's hard to be surprised if you establish up front that you're
likely to be surprised.

It helps to know the rules of physics in
the universe where you are choosing to live.

quinta-feira, 3 de dezembro de 2015

Older guy walks into the service area on the parkway and asks one of the staff, "do you have a pay phone? My car broke down and I need to call my daughter."

The staff person, killing time by checking his cell phone, is confused. He's not sure what a pay phone is, then he figures it out, and says, "no," before going back to his phone.
It never occurs to him to hand the phone to the man so he can make a call.
Part of it is the boss's fault. He's not paying much attention to hiring or training or incentives. He's paying as little as he can, and turnover is high. After all, every one of his customers is just passing through, no need to care.

And that message comes through to the staff, loud and clear.

Of course, at one level, all of us are just passing through.

From a more practical, business level, the ease of digital connection means that it's more and more
unlikely that you can be uncaring or mistreat people and not be noticed.

But most of all, life is better when we act like we might see someone again soon, isn't it?

An interesting person is interesting to us
because she combines two things: Truth and surprise.

The truth: Not necessarily a law of physics, not necessarily a
measurable truth in nature, but merely the truth of experience. "I believe
this," or "I see that."

And surprise. Note that surprise is always local. Surprising to me, the audience. That's one reason that it's
said that interesting people are interested—they are empathetic enough to
realize about what might be surprising to the person in the room, and they
care enough to deliver on that insight.

Everyone is capable of telling the truth.
And everyone has been surprising at least once.

Which means that being an interesting
person is a choice. We can choose to show up, to care enough to contribute our
humanity to the next interaction.

It's a choice, but a difficult one,
because being interesting feels risky. People are afraid to be interesting, not
unable to be interesting.

You're not born uninteresting. But it's
entirely possible you've persuaded yourself to be so frightened of the
consequences that you no longer have the passion, the generosity or the guts to
be interesting any longer.

Without a doubt, we need your interesting.

By me

The same applies to contents. Content
sources that do not pass the idea of being true, soon cease to be seen. Content
sources that do not surprise or did not update quickly cease to be seen.

1.Where’s the
benefit? – people enjoy reading articles that teach them something. Use your
headline to tell your readers what they are going to learn in your article.

2.There’s no need
to reinvent the wheel – people enjoy headlines that are “How To” and “List”
oriented. So, use them… even if they seem played out.

3.Stats are better
than opinion – if you have data that backs up your main point, use it within your
headline.

4.Put people over
search engines – adding keywords to your headline to make it more search engine friendly
isn’t a good idea if it makes your headline boring and dull. Write them for
people over search engines.

5.Create a sense
of urgency – by telling
your readers that they only have a short window to act on your information, you
are more likely to get them to read it.

6.Leverage
laziness – people don’t
like working, so leverage that within your headline. For example, your headline
could start off with… “the lazy man’s way to…”.

7.Appeal to
emotions – we are all
humans, and sparking an emotional feeling within your headline is a great way
to draw a reader’s attention.

8.Capitalize on
mistakes – people make
mistakes, so creating a headline that shows what people can learn from your, or
other people’s, mistakes can easily draw a big audience. My most popular post
on Quick Sprout is still about a handful of business mistakes
that lost me money.

9.Evoke curiosity – people are naturally
curious, so making your headline a question will encourage them to click
through and read your content.

10.The double
whammy – by combing a
few of the elements above and using them in one headline, you can create the
double whammy effect. For example, your headline might read “How to Increase
Your SEO Traffic with These 3 Simple Steps”.

This is clearly and demonstrably true of mutual funds. It's easy to confirm.

And yet...

We are very uncomfortable with randomness. So the newspaper does a 12 page section of mutual funds, filled with articles and ads and charts, all touting past performance.

Superstition is what we call the belief in causation due to a mistaken correlation of unrelated data. A broken mirror doesn't actually cause seven years of bad luck, and cheering in a certain way isn't going to help the Yankees, sorry.

Of course, we don't live in a completely random world. The scientific method and statistics make it more likely than ever that you can find trends that actually matter.

The hard part is accepting that the random things actually are unpredictable, and refusing to spend time or money guessing on what can't be reliably guessed. It frees up a lot of time and resources to focus on the things that are actually worth measuring.

My Comments

Past results prove only that in principle we know how to do
things, perform tasks ... But look at the case of some countries ... they take
advantage of the wave of growth ... they do not prepare themselves ... and then,
after the boom, they sink